then on a lighter note, here's one that i read that pissed me off this week as well as a few of the other posts written in response to it. well the first one riled me up, and apparently i was not alone...

When Carrie Goretzka's two young girls ran out onto the porch of their suburban home 30 miles east of Pittsburgh in the late afternoon on June 2, 2009, what they saw was a scene of unrelenting horror.

"Mommy, Mommy," yelled the oldest child, 4-year-old Chloe. "Mommy is on fire. Mommy is on fire."

If punitive damages were ever to be capped, then the bean counters would diligently be working to crunch the numbers, i.e., "If we provide a substandard service or product and X amount of people will be injured or killed, it will cost us X, but if we fix the problems, it will cost us less than X, no need to fix anything."

"I wish I could say that government is the best check on the free-enterprise system," Specter said, "but, unfortunately, it is not."

Since President Obama took office, the U.S. has executed more than 300
covert drone attacks in Pakistan, a country with which we're not at war.

In 2012 Obama described the government's drone campaign as "a targeted,
focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists trying
to go in and harm Americans" that hasn't caused "a huge number of
civilian casualties." Whether this is accurate may depend on what the
word huge means to you.

but they're not just for over there.

But the drone industry is ramping up for a big landgrab the moment the
regulatory environment starts to relax. At last year's Association for
Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) trade show in Las Vegas,
more than 500 companies pitched drones for filming crowds and tornados
and surveying agricultural fields, power lines, coalfields, construction
sites, gas spills and archaeological digs.

naturally when they're flying over the U.S. regularly there will be accidents as they come crashing down. About 20% apparently just give up and fall out of the sky. I do like this warning:

The moral ambiguity of covert drone strikes will clarify itself very
quickly if another country claims the right under international law to
strike its enemies in the U.S. There may come a day when the U.S.
bitterly regrets the precedents it has set.